[BGB] Will the US attack Iran?

[Jamie O'Keefe]

Hi folks,

Not sure if this is considered politics or just military talk (though
I guess it is partisan), but I thought I would forward this article
on.  Slap me down if I have gone off topic.  :-)

Do you think he is correct that the US may attack Iran or do you think
he is stretching the facts?  Would we use nukes?  What are other folks
reading that present a different view?

Jamie

ZNet Commentary
Iran: The War Begins February 03, 2007
By John Pilger

As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush
administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its
latest target, by the spring.

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on
Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time"
for its dis aster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of
American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real
target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in
Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy
the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies
in Iraq."

"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State
Department spokesman on 24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved
in these networks and that they are working with individuals and
groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government."
Like Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence
that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the
"evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the
Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda,
condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in
Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York
Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military
officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border
supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs
of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.

As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign
opposition grows, "neo-con" fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Che-
ney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless
they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are
potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and
fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is
to end Iran's nuclear threat.

In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon, nor has it ever
threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the
political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before
2017, at the earliest. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has
abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which
it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections
under its legal obligations - until gratuitous, punitive measures were
added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the
International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting
its civilian nuclear programme to military use.

The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors
have been able to "go anywhere and see anything". They inspected the
nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and
will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed
ElBaradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic
consequences" and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.

Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other
countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein,
who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and
biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel,
the world's fifth military power - with its thermo nuclear weapons
aimed at Middle East targets and an unmatched record of defying UN
resolutions, as the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation
- Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no
territory other than its own.

The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by
familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear
ambitions", just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD
arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that
has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out,
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "has done yeoman service in facilitating
[this]"; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel
in October 2005 reveals how it has been distorted. According to Juan
Cole, American professor of modern Middle East and south Asian history
at the University of Michigan, and other Farsi language analysts,
Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He
said: "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of
time." This, says Cole, "does not imply military action or killing
anyone at all". Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Israeli regime
to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is
repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs,
with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite
them.

Nuclear option

The one piece of "solid evidence" is the threat posed by the United
States. An American naval build-up in the eastern Mediterranean has
begun. This is almost certainly part of what the Pentagon calls
CONPLAN 8022-02, which is the aerial bombing of Iran. In 2004,
National Security Presidential Directive 35, entitled "Nuclear Weapons
Deployment Authorisation", was issued. It is classified, of course,
but the presumption has long been that NSPD 35 authorised the
stockpiling and deployment of "tactical" nuclear weapons in the Middle
East.

This does not mean Bush will use them against Iran, but for the first
time since the most dangerous years of the cold war, the use of what
were then called "limited" nuclear weapons is being discussed openly
in Washington. What they are debating is the prospect of other
Hiroshimas and of radioactive fallout across the Middle East and
central Asia. Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker last year that
American bombers "have been flying simulated nuclear weapons delivery
missions . . . since last summer".

The well-informed Arab Times in Kuwait says that Bush will attack Iran
before the end of April. One of Russia's most senior military
strategists, General Leonid Ivashov, says the US will use nuclear
munitions delivered by cruise missiles launched from the
Mediterranean. "The war in Iraq," he wrote on 24 January, "was just
one element in a series of steps in the process of regional
destabilisation.

It was only a phase in getting closer to dealing with Iran and other
countries. [When the attack on Iran begins] Israel is sure to come
under Iranian missile strikes . . . Posing as victims, the Israelis .
. . will suffer some tolerable damage and then the outraged US will
destabilise Iran finally, making it look like a noble mission of
retribution . . . Public opinion is already under pressure. There will
be a growing anti-Iranian . . . hysteria, . . . leaks, disinformation
et cetera . . . It . . . remain[s] unclear . . . whether the US
Congress is going to authorise the war."

Asked about a US Senate resolution disapproving of the "surge" of US
troops to Iraq, Vice-President Cheney said: "It won't stop us." Last
November, a majority of the American electorate voted for the
Democratic Party to control Congress and stop the war in Iraq.

Apart from insipid speeches of "disapproval", this has not happened
and is unlikely to happen. Influential Democrats, such as the new
leader of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and the would-be
presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, have
disported themselves before the Israeli lobby. Edwards is regarded in
his party as a "liberal". He was one of a high-level American
contingent at a recent Israeli conference in Herzliya, where he spoke
about "an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel [sic]. At the
top of these threats is Iran . . . All options are on the table to
ensure that Iran will never get a nuclear weapon." Hillary Clinton has
said: "US policy must be unequivocal . . . We have to keep all options
on the table." Pelosi and Howard Dean, another liberal, have
distinguished themselves by attacking the former president Jimmy
Carter, who oversaw the Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt
and has had the gall to write a truthful book accusing Israel of
becoming an "apartheid state". Pelosi said: "Carter does not speak for
the Democratic Party." She is right, alas.

In Britain, Downing Street has been presented with a document entitled
Answering the Charges by Professor Abbas Edalat, of Imperial College
London, on behalf of others seeking to expose the disinformation on
Iran. Blair remains silent. Apart from the usual honourable
exceptions, parliament remains shamefully silent, too.

Can this really be happening again, less than four years after the
invasion of Iraq, which has left some 650,000 people dead? I wrote
virtually this same article early in 2003; for Iran now, read Iraq
then. And is it not remarkable that North Korea has not been attacked?
North Korea has nuclear weapons.

In numerous surveys, such as the one released on 23 January by the BBC
World Service, "we", the majority of humanity, have made clear our
revulsion for Bush and his vassals. As for Blair, the man is now
politically and morally naked for all to see. So who speaks out, apart
from Professor Edalat and his colleagues? Privileged journalists,
scholars and artists, writers and thespians, who sometimes speak about
"freedom of speech", are as silent as a dark West End theatre. What
are they waiting for? The declaration of another thousand-year Reich,
or a mushroom cloud in the Middle East, or both?

[John Pilger is a renowned author, journalist and documentary
film-maker. A war correspondent, his writings have appear in numerous
magazines, and newspapers.]

February 5, 2007 New Statesman (UK)